PSQ

Political Science Quarterly
Volume 115 No. 3 (Fall 2000)

 

Effective National Security Advising:
Recovering the Eisenhower Legacy
By Fred I. Greenstein, Richard H. Immerman

 

FRED I. GREENSTEIN is professor of politics at Princeton University. His most recent book is The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton.

RICHARD H. IMMERMAN is professor and chair of history at Temple University. His most recent books are Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy, co-written with Robert Bowie, and John Foster Dulles: Piety, Power, and Pragmatism in U.S. Foreign Policy.

As the new president and his national security team ready themselves to address the global demands of a new century, they have two broad options. They can follow the precedent of the Clinton administration and take it for granted that the post-cold war international environment does not lend itself to overall planning, responding to international contingencies as they arise. Or they can conclude that precisely because international affairs are no longer defined by the extended confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, it is crucial to establish priorities and minimize the danger of being caught flat-footed by emerging developments.

To the extent that it opts for the latter, the new administration would be advised to take note of a national security advisory system that was devised and operated by a chief executive who had devoted much of his adult life to the organization of collective endeavors—Dwight D. Eisenhower, the architect of the Normandy invasion and the Allied campaign in Europe in World War II. During his time in the White House, Eisenhower was beloved by the American people, but widely perceived by political cognoscenti to have been a mere presidential figurehead. We now know, however, that the former supreme commander was an astute and informed political leader who advanced his purposes [End Page 335] by playing down the political side of his leadership and playing up his role as a head of state whose public appeal transcended partisan divisions. 1

This article is an exercise in the recovery of institutional memory. By outlining the features of the highly systematic Eisenhower national security policy process and analyzing its performance, we seek to enhance the ability of the new administration to structure its operations in a productive manner. The procedures that lead to the selection of American presidents place no premium on choosing candidates with organization competence, particularly in the period since winning the presidential nomination has been a function of a candidate's ability to vie successfully in a marathon of state primary elections. For this reason it is vital that new presidents and their advisers make themselves aware of the rich array of positive and negative models available in the record of the modern presidency. The Eisenhower system has distinctly positive implications for the future of national security policy advising.

A Discarded Legacy

Just as Eisenhower's contemporary critics belittled his political skills, they also deprecated the organizational machinery he instituted for making national security policy. In the aftermath of the Soviet success in launching of a pair of Earth satellites in October 1957, there was an eruption of criticism of the Eisenhower administration for its apparent failure to keep up with the Soviets in intercontinental ballistic missile development. 2 Rather than attack the immensely popular Ike over what they perceived to be a missile gap, many of his critics leveled their fire on the organization of his presidency. They argued that Eisenhower was a misplaced military man who relied on a hierarchy of subordinates, cutting himself off from the diversity of advice and information necessary for a president to engage in effective leadership. One of their principal targets was the institutional machinery he employed to systematize his administration's national security deliberations. Eisenhower's National Security Council (NSC), his critics maintained, was an excessively bureaucratized body out of which emerged "least-common-denominator" policies. Eisenhower's reliance on formal organization, the critique continued, had contributed to unimaginative policies that failed to meet the challenge of global competition with the Soviet Union and its allies. 3

Upon taking office, John F. Kennedy unceremoniously jettisoned the staff arrangements of the Eisenhower presidency, substituting for it his own famously ad hoc operating methods. Since 1961, there has been an alternating pattern of highly informal and somewhat more formal national security advising, concluding with the notoriously disorganized Clinton advisory process. Meanwhile, the most comprehensively structured of all presidential national security advisory systems—that of Eisenhower—has receded from institutional memory, without receiving an adequate assessment.

Before laying out the principal features of that system, a strong caveat is in order. What we are about to outline is a policy-planning process, not a decision-making process. Eisenhower made the operational decisions of his presidency in informal meetings with small groups of advisers in the Oval Office, not in the NSC. Nevertheless, the formal and informal national security processes of the Eisenhower presidency complemented one another. Moreover, the formal process was as important for informing Eisenhower's principal national security aides and welding them into a cohesive team as for the written enunciations of national security policy that were its formal product.

Eisenhower's national security system had the following elements, each of which requires elaboration: 4

A Policy-Oriented, Organization-Minded President

Dwight Eisenhower entered the presidency with extensive experience in the realms of national security policy and its organization. Before World War II, he had served in responsible staff positions in the War Department and the Philippines, beginning in the late 1920s. Within days after Pearl Harbor, Eisenhower was summoned to the Pentagon to become the army's top strategic planner. [End Page 337] In less than a half year later, his base of operations moved to England, where as supreme commander of the Allied military campaign in Europe, he was a significant actor on the international scene, a status that continued in the postwar years. 5

Eisenhower served as chief of staff of the army from 1945 to 1948. He then retired from active duty to become president of Columbia University, but he regularly commuted to Washington to serve as an unofficial national security adviser to President Harry S. Truman. In 1950, Truman called on Eisenhower as the first military commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance Organization, a capacity in which he played a key part in forging the alliance that waged the cold war. It was only when he reached the conclusion that the almost certain Republican nominee, Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, was unprepared to commit the United States to take an active part in the Western alliance that Eisenhower entered the 1952 presidential race. Upon being elected, he embarked on a dual effort to frame an enduring national security strategy and create sound procedures for carrying it out.

No president had a stronger commitment to the effective organization of policy making than Eisenhower. "Organization cannot make a genius out of an incompetent" or "make the decisions which are required to trigger necessary action," he commented in his memoirs. However, "disorganization can scarcely fail to result in inefficiency and can easily lead to disaster." 6 On another occasion Eisenhower observed that the president has a particular need for a "well-developed staff organization" in the sphere of national security, because the international area is fraught with "situations of actual or probable conflict," and "the weaponry of modern military establishments increase their destructiveness" with "bewildering speed." 7

A Neutral Process Manager

The position that has since been occupied by such high profile policy entrepreneurs as McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brezinski was created by Eisenhower, who stipulated that its incumbent was to be a process manager, not a policy advocate. The importance Eisenhower assigned to that position is evinced by the priority he gave to introducing the first occupant of that role to his colleagues at a 12 January 1953, preinauguration meeting he convened with the future members of his administration. The meeting opened with a review of Inauguration Day events, following which Eisenhower introduced the man he was appointing to the new position of assistant to the president for national security affairs. He was Robert Cutler, a Boston banker who had been a wartime aide to General George C. Marshall and a foreign policy aide in the Truman administration. Noting that Cutler's position was one of several he had filled with men who were equal in stature to members of the Cabinet, Eisenhower indicated that he planned to transform the NSC into a body that would wrestle constructively with issues bearing on the nation's security.

Cutler then took the floor and outlined his responsibilities. Stressing that he would be exercising his responsibilities with a "passion for anonymity," Cutler remarked that the meetings of the NSC in the Truman administration had been "rather pro-forma." 8 Things would be different in the system he had been instructed by Eisenhower to design. Over the next two months, Cutler consulted with such veteran national security figures as Ferdinand Eberstadt, Robert Lovett, and General George C. Marshall. Marshall set the tone, commenting that Truman's NSC was too "evanescent." The Truman administration NSC meetings were "of busy men who had no time to pay to the business before them, and not being prepared, therefore took refuge in nonparticipation or in protecting their own departments." Marshall identified an additional pair of shortcomings in the Truman NSC: its policy papers "never presented alternatives to decide upon," and Truman himself was not "a force at the table to bring out discussion." 9

The old hands consulted by Cutler also stressed the need for better coordination of military, diplomatic, and domestic policy; urged that there be greater attention to the financial implications of national security policy; and emphasized the desirability of providing the NSC with a backup staff. Drawing on such advice, Cutler devised a scheme for systematizing the national security advisory process, which Eisenhower instituted by executive order in March 1953.

Framing NSC Deliberation

The most distinctive component of the newly constituted national security advisory process was the body that set the agenda of the NSC and prepared the documents that framed its debates—the Planning Board. The board consisted of the assistant secretaries for planning of each of the governmental bodies represented in the NSC, officials who because of their high positions in their [End Page 339] departments had full access to their chiefs and could draw on all of the expertise available in their agencies. 10

The importance of the Planning Board was highlighted by Eisenhower in an early NSC meeting, when he remarked to the council members that they themselves simply did not have the time to think out "the best decisions regarding the national security. Someone must therefore do much of this thinking for you." So that the planning process received the undivided attention of its participants, Eisenhower instructed the board members to avoid accompanying their principals on trips out of the country, remaining on the job in order to "supply a continuity of planning and thought." 11

The Planning Board, which normally met twice a week, was charged with flushing out the policy views of each of the NSC's member bodies on major national security issues. The board subjected those positions to what Cutler called an "acid bath," sharply delineating them and identifying and specifying points of disagreement. The board was strictly instructed not to water down disagreements or cover them up. Instead, "policy splits" were to be spelled out (often in parallel columns) so that they might be debated in the NSC and resolved by the president. 12

Before the documents hammered out by the Planning Board were discussed by the NSC, the board members briefed their chiefs on them, explaining their own positions and reviewing the splits. Cutler himself briefed Eisenhower. The superiors of the Planning Board members were not obliged to support the policy recommendations of their department's representatives on the board. Instead, Eisenhower instructed everyone involved in the national security process to view himself as a general presidential adviser rather than a departmental delegate. The Planning Board was the engine of the Eisenhower national security process. While Eisenhower's critics dismissed it as a mere "paper mill," they did so without direct knowledge of its workings. Those who did observe it told a very different story. As one prominent outside observer of the process put it, "Never have I seen a group of men keener, more sensitive in their instinct to understand what was said, more sympathetic to a presentation, or more penetrating in their questions." 13

The NSC as a Forum for Rigorous Debate

The NSC met 366 times over the eight years of the Eisenhower presidency, an average of forty-four meetings a year. It had a regular meeting time (Thursday mornings) and meeting place (the Cabinet room). Eisenhower presided over 329 of these sessions; the others were held with the vice president or secretary of state in the chair. 14 The council met at a table just large enough to seat the NSC members and a handful of special attendees. Eisenhower sat at the head, flanked by the secretaries of state and defense. Cutler and the men who followed him in his position (Dillon Anderson and Gordon Gray) sat at the foot of the table, presenting the agenda topics and summarizing the points of disagreement in the discussion papers.

Normally the meetings began with an intelligence summary by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Eisenhower then typically turned to the secretary of state to open the discussion. Other vocal participants included the secretary of defense, the secretary of the Treasury, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the vice president. Eisenhower took an active part in the discussions, injecting comments, asking questions, and sometimes taking a devil's advocate stance to probe the implication of a proposal or bring out policy options. In order to make certain that his comments were not mistaken for decisions, Eisenhower and the assistant for national security prepared a record of action after the meeting and distributed it to the council.

Excellent, though not verbatim, records exist of the Eisenhower NSC meetings. These have been extensively studied by historians and political scientists, but largely in analyses of particular episodes, such as the 1954 Indochina crisis and the 1956 Suez crisis. The NSC itself awaits comprehensive examination, but a number of its characteristics are clearly evident. The meetings were notable for their sharpness of focus, which derived from discussion of policy papers prepared by the Planning Board. They were marked by genuine debate, mainly over policies but also over the more general aspects of current operational issues. Early in the 1954 Indochina crisis, for example, there was a pointed disagreement between Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Arthur W. Radford and Treasury Secretary George Humphrey. Radford favored the use of American air power to relieve the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, but Humphrey warned against squandering the nation's resources on military conflicts in peripheral areas of the world. The final decision, which was made by Eisenhower outside of the NSC, was not to launch an air strike. 15

Despite the intensity of many of the exchanges, the meetings were conspicuous for their good-humored camaraderie. They also were striking for the openness of the debate. The participants expressed themselves freely, not hesitating to express disagreement with Eisenhower, although it was always evident that he was the ultimate decision maker. The assistant for national security affairs played an active, but largely procedural part in the deliberations. He kept the debate on track, directed the council's attention to disagreements and ambiguities, and watched for signs of policy slippage. Thus on an occasion during the Indochina crisis when Eisenhower remarked that if American troops were deployed in the jungles of Southeast Asia they should be provided with a particular weapon, Cutler pointed out that existing policies made no provision for the use of American troops in Indochina. 16

Eisenhower never intended the statements of policy produced by the NSC to serve as blueprints for specific operations. When the NSC members did discuss ongoing episodes, they did so in terms of their general implications. In one meeting during the 1956 Suez crisis, for example, Eisenhower redirected a discussion when it strayed into operational matters, reminding the members that they were there to discuss general policy issues. Still, the NSC process informed his operational decisions. Eisenhower stated his view of the relationship between planning and operations in a 1967 volume on national security problems: "To my mind." he wrote, "the secret of a sound, satisfactory decision made on an emergency basis has always been that the responsible official has been `living with the problem' before it becomes acute." For this reason, he advised President-elect John Kennedy that the NSC was "the most important weekly meeting of the government," an assertion Kennedy did not take to heart. 17

Implementing NSC Action

Even before Eisenhower adopted the new process of policy formulation, work had begun on improving the procedure for implementing NSC actions. What emerged was a body called the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB). Like the Planning Board, the OCB was a product of Cutler's consultations with veterans of the postwar national security process. One group of consultants advised Cutler that "there exists a serious gap between the formulation of general objectives and the detailed actions required to give effect to them." The consultants recommended that there be created "within the National Security Council structure, a group capable of assuring the coordinated execution of national security policies"—an organ like the Planning Board that represented the agencies and departments with input into foreign policy. Eisenhower swiftly endorsed the recommendation. 18

Like the Planning Board, the OCB consisted of top second-level officials in the agencies responsible for national security. It was chaired by the undersecretary of state, and its members included such officials as the deputy secretaries of defense and mutual security. Its executive officer also attended Planning Board meetings. Just as the Planning Board drafted the policy papers deliberated on by the NSC, the OCB made plans for carrying out the policies that emerged from the NSC process. To that end, the OCB transmitted regular reports to the NSC, summarizing the actions it had taken to execute policies, and evaluated the policies' "effectiveness, timeliness, and applicability." 19 Cutler and his successors included discussions of these reports on the NSC agenda. The performance of the OCB never achieved Eisenhower's expectations. Still, he and his associates never doubted that it made an important contribution to America's national security, if only because it fostered regular give and take on the part of officials who needed to cooperate with one another in order to execute the nation's foreign and national security policies.

A Bottom Line

Eisenhower's NSC system was depicted by its critics as a bureaucratic machine that spewed piles of useless paper. That is a caricature of its operation. It did produce numerous policy documents, but a high proportion of them proved to be of enduring value in the nation's foreign policy. It also had major informal consequences. The NSC meetings and the processes leading up to them made for a well-informed, rigorously analytical national security team, which contributed to the coherence of the administration's policies. Eisenhower's aides knew where he stood on particular issues and what his overall policies were. Aware that they had had their say, Eisenhower's associates displayed impressive public cohesion. There was a general absence of the public and semipublic feuds and cleavages that have marked a number of later presidencies, as well as of the tension that existed in many later presidencies between the secretary of state and the national security adviser. Eisenhower's national security process was also unlike that of a number of later presidents in that it made full use of the expertise of the departments and agencies represented in the NSC.

Because Eisenhower was a national security professional with long-established and well-grounded views of national security, he was better equipped than most chief executives have been to operate without an elaborate foreign affairs advisory system. He nevertheless held that the NSC enhanced and enriched his thinking. Even when he chose to take a different course of action from that favored by his subordinates, he once wrote, "the NSC debates never failed to give me a deeper understanding of questions. In several instances, I might add, such deliberations persuaded me to reverse some of my preconceived notions." 20

The spirit of Eisenhower's national security advisory process anticipated one of the most thoughtful proposals that has been offered for improving national security advising—the Stanford University political scientist Alexander L. George's 1972 proposal for an organizational arrangement in which the president is exposed to vigorous multiple advocacy of a wide range of policies in a process that is supervised by an assistant for national security who is a "custodian-manager" rather than a policy advocate. 21 In an oral history interview that preceded George's proposal by a number of years, Eisenhower presaged that proposal with the following observation about his philosophy of decision making, which is applicable both to the policy planning process he instituted and to his operational decisions:

Eisenhower's NSC process did not guarantee the success of his administration's national security actions. However, it increased the likelihood that those actions would be grounded in sound information and rigorous analysis. Eisenhower's two terms were notable for the absence of the kinds of flawed consultations that led to such fiascoes as Kennedy's abortive effort to land anti-Castro guerrillas at Cuba's Bay of Pigs in 1961 and Jimmy Carter's failed hostage rescue mission in Iran in 1980. 23

One size does not fit all in presidential organization: advisory processes must be tailored to the individual they serve. Still, even if the next and future presidents do not adopt the Eisenhower system in toto, they may want to adapt features of it to their own needs. Whatever they chose to do, they would be wise to emulate Eisenhower in melding policy planning with political operations.

 

Endnotes

Note 1: Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and most recently, Greenstein, The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton (New York: Free Press, 2000), esp. chap. 4. See also Richard H. Immerman, "Confessions of an Eisenhower Revisionist: An Agonizing Reappraisal," Diplomatic History 14 (Summer 1990): 319-342. Back

Note 2: Peter Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Back

Note 3: This critique was reflected throughout the hearings conducted by the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations' Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery. The hearings began in 1959 under the chairmanship of Senator Henry M. Jackson (D-WA). See Henry M. Jackson, ed., The National Security Council: Jackson Subcommittee Papers on Policy-Making at the Presidential Level (New York: Praeger, 1965). Back

Note 4: On the organization and fundamental components of Eisenhower's national security process, see Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. chap. 5. Back

Note 5: Biographies of Eisenhower are numerous. For an explicit discussion of Eisenhower's pre-presidential career as preparation for his management of security after 1953, see Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy, esp. chap. 2. Back

Note 6: Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 114. Back

Note 7: Dwight D. Eisenhower, "The Central Role of the President in the Conduct of Security Affairs" in Amos A. Jordon, ed., Issues of National Security in the 1970s: Essays Presented to Colonel George A. Lincoln on his Sixtieth Birthday (New York: Praeger, 1967), 207. Back

Note 8: Proceedings of the Cabinet Meetings, 12-13 January 1953, "Cabinet Meeting January 12-13, 1953," Cabinet series, Dwight D. Eisenhower Papers as President of the United States, 1953-1961 (Ann Whitman File), Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KA (hereafter cited as AWF). Back

Note 9: George Marshall testimony, NSC Study, 19 February 1953, "NSC—Organization and Functions [1949-1953] (5)," NSC series, Administrative subseries, Records of the White House Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, Eisenhower Library. Back

Note 10: Unlike the cabinet, the NSC has a statutory basis. It was instituted in the National Security Act of 1947. During the period of the Eisenhower presidency, its statutory members were the president, vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, and director of the office of defense mobilization. Because of the importance of economic solvency in his national security policy, Eisenhower added the secretary of the Treasury and the director of the Bureau of Budget to this group. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff attended NSC meetings in an advisory capacity. Critics of the process had the mistaken impression that the Eisenhower NSC was a huge and unwieldy body, an impression that may have been fostered by the attendance when appropriate of a variety of staff aides, who sat along the wall but did not take part in the discussions. Back

Note 11: Memorandum of NSC meeting, March 19, 1953, "137th meeting of the NSC," NSC series, AWF; Brief Notes on Planning Board Meeting, May 6, 1953, CJCS 334 (NSC) 1953, U.S. Department of Defense, Records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Record Group 218, National Archives II, College Park, MD. Back

Note 12: Greenstein, Hidden-Hand Presidency, 128-29. Back

Note 13: Entry for 1 March 1954, Clarence Randall Journals, volume 1, "Washington After the Commission," Princeton University, Clarence Randall Papers, Princeton, New Jersey. Back

Note 14: Gordon Gray to Eisenhower, 13 January 1961, "Gray, Gordon," Name Series, AWF. Back

Note 15: John P. Burke, Fred I. Greenstein, with the collaboration of Larry Berman and Richard Immerman, How Presidents Test Reality: Decisions on Vietnam, 1954 and 1965 (New York: Russell Sage, 1989), 72-73. Back

Note 16: Cutler's statement may seem to have been an expression of opposition to American military involvement in Indochina, but on other occasions he warned against departures from the existing policy that would have increased the likelihood of a communist victory in Indochina. Back

Note 17: Dwight D. Eisenhower, "The Central Role of the President in the Conduct of Security Affairs" in Jordon, ed., Issues in National Security in the 1970s, 214; entry for December 6, 1960, in Robert F. Ferrell, ed., The Eisenhower Diaries (New York: Norton, 1981), 379-80. Back

Note 18: Report to the President by The President's Committee on Informational Activities [Jackson Committee], 30 June 1953, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-54, 2:1854-55. Back

Note 19: Informal note of Jackson Committee meeting, 28 March 1953, "Special Assistant (Cutler) memoranda, 1953 (1)," Executive Secretary's subject file series, Papers of the White House Office of the National Security Council Staff, Eisenhower Library. Back

Note 20: "As early as 1954," he went on to say, "I had concluded that the American contingent in NATO should immediately be substantially reduced. After long discussions with the state and defense departments and the CIA, however, I had to change my mind." Eisenhower, "The Central Role of the President in the Conduct of Security Affairs," 215. Back

Note 21: George L. Alexander, "The Case for Multiple Advocacy in Making Foreign Policy," American Political Science Review 66 (September 1972): 751-85. Back

Note 22: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Columbia Oral History Interview, 20 July 1967. Our citation comes from the original draft transcript of the oral history that is available at the Eisenhower Library. The transcript released to the public omits the passage that we quote. Back

Note 23: The greatest contretemps of the Eisenhower presidency was the Soviets' downing of a U.S. U-2 plane in the spring of 1960, an event that doomed a planned summit conference between Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev. The plane in question was overflying the Soviet Union as part of a highly classified program that had not been brought to the attention of the NSC. Back